As the stagnating death metal genre appeared to be meeting its own commercial and creative end, black metal clearly became the underground’s extreme music of choice by 1995. A first cousin of death metal, black metal took death metal’s aggression and high-velocity playing, and married it with grandiose symphonic melody, in some cases, while stripping down the production and musicianship to atavistic levels in others.
Darkthrone was a perfect example of the latter. After debuting with the angular, dark death metal of Soulside Journey via Peaceville Records in 1990, the Norwegians quickly traded in their sweatpants and white high tops for spiked armlets and black-and-white corpsepaint. With 1991’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Darkthrone became the first high-profile death metal act to publicly switch allegiance from death metal to the black metal camp.
“For me, playing black metal offered more soul and feeling,” explains Darkthrone drummer and lyricist Fenriz. “We sacked our bassist and went for the jugular around ‘90/’91. In retrospect, it seems like a subconscious strategy—I know, perspective is everything. But I am sure we just followed our hearts and angry minds at the time. Death metal became more about musicianship than message. This was a time when people actually liked Death’s Spiritual Healing album. Need I say more?”
Moreover, many black metal bands in Scandinavia were generally antagonistic towards death metal bands, some black metal artists even sarcastically referring to death metal as “life metal.”
“The black metal movement was, at some point, hostile to parts of the death metal scene,” recalls Samoth, former guitarist and co-founder of the Norwegian black metal band Emperor. “Certain people were opposed to the idea of death metal becoming so ‘normal’ and ‘mainstream’ in many ways, and with the so-called ‘trend’ of death metal, we also saw a lot of prototype bands that offered little spirit and excitement. Black metal, in a way, became the opposition—it was all about the real death and darkness, and being true to the underground cult. However, there were still many people who enjoyed death metal, especially bands that seemed to embrace the dark side with a real dedication, like Deicide and Morbid Angel.”
Most Scandinavian acts, however, such as Marduk and Immortal, quickly abandoned their death metal rehearsal roots in favor of black metal’s more extreme image—and in some cases—ideologies. Varg Vikernes, of the one-man Norwegian black metal jam Burzum, is undoubtedly the most prominent figure among them. Prior to his murder and arson exploits—which made front-page news in Norway and in music publications throughout Europe in the early ‘90s—Vikernes’ crude black metal sounds actually caught the attention of Earache Records.
“At first, we wanted to sign Burzum and I think he wanted to sign with Earache,” says Earache’s Pearson. “He flew over and stayed at my house—this is before the murder. I thought he was a very interesting character, very charismatic. Of course, I had no idea what was going to happen in the future. But the main reason we didn’t get involved with him is because of his racist views. I remember we were having pizza, and he was just coming off with total Nazi stuff, and we were completely shocked. After that, we wanted to keep black metal at arm’s length, because we were exposed to the more unsavory elements. I mean, black metal’s music is great. And maybe we gave it too wide a berth, actually. We got involved with Varg and it left an unpleasant taste in our mouth, so we thought, ‘We’ll leave that alone.’ As a label boss, I’m kicking myself, because of a bad experience with Burzum, we basically turned our back on black metal. We shunned it when it was the most exciting music in the world, and just watched that explode right in front of our eyes.”
Other labels didn’t make the same mistake. Soon black metal bands such as British sensations Cradle of Filth, and Norwegians such as Emperor and Dimmu Borgir were selling the hundreds of thousands of records throughout Europe and the US that Obituary and Deicide did only a few years earlier.
“It’s rather ironic,” says Samoth, “that black metal probably ended up being even more ‘mainstream’ than death metal in the end.”
Such divergent popularity further stretched the rift between the genre’s artists, even if, as Günter Ford points out, there was such an obvious similarity between the two movements.
“It should have never been separated,” he offers. “How different is black metal from death metal, really? They’re not reinventing the wheel. Fundamentally, it borrows heavily from death metal. In the ‘90s, the bands that did come along that were innovative got lumped into a new genre instead of being kept in their own genre. If they had been kept in the death metal thing, it would have been like, ‘Wow, this is a new death metal band called Emperor that’s doing this cool thing with makeup and keyboards.’ You would have had an explosion of new bands coming in and feeding the genre, and you wouldn’t have had a downfall in the mid-‘90s.”
9
Back From the Dead
TERRORIZER MAGAZINE’S 1996 YEAR-END ISSUE served as a clear snapshot of death metal’s evaporating presence in the underground. At the decade’s onset, the genre was perhaps the lone recognized form of extreme music, but only a few years later, just a pair of death metal records—Arch Enemy’s debut album Black Earth and Vader’s De Profundis—appeared in the magazine’s top 30 records list for the year. Other forms of extreme music—though partially or largely derived from death metal—had taken the genre’s place in the extreme music pantheon.
While black metal continued its commercial ascent, doom metal bands gained widespread acceptance, passing on death metal’s speed yet embracing its subterranean qualities while marrying them with the keyboard swaths of ‘80s-flavored gothic rock. The first such group to move in such a direction was British quintet Paradise Lost, who made the transition from sloppy death metal act to gothic and doom metal progenitors with their 1991 album Gothic.
“We were listening to extreme metal music many years before it emerged from the underground—it was and still can be very exciting music,” says Paradise Lost vocalist Nick Holmes. “But it does have its limitations. I think we explored every area we could, and grew out of it artistically and wanted to try other angles.
“After a point, I mean, how heavy or downtuned can it get—until the guitar strings are literally hanging off the neck?” he continues. “The gravel growl had worn a little thin for me, besides I’ve burst enough blood vessels in my eyeballs barking like a rabid dog. You can only take it so far before you think, ‘Hang on, I’ve got another 60 shows to do and already I feel like my throat has been cut.’”
“We felt we had gone as far as we could with our style,” seconds Paradise Lost guitarist Gregor Mackintosh. “So it was time for a little branching out to see if we could become more melodious but retain the dark edge.”
“In the early ‘90s, we were into Morbid Angel and all the Napalm stuff and the early Roadrunner stuff, like Obituary’s Slowly We Rot—the classics, as we call them now,” recalls Calvin Robertshaw, former guitarist and founding member of fellow British doomsters My Dying Bride. “Once we became a band, I started to filter out a lot of the death metal I had been listening to. A lot of it just got tired, so we started to move in a different direction. We just wanted to let these death metal songs develop and breathe by building on them. We didn’t want to set boundaries for ourselves by just being a death metal band, but the influence was still apparent in our music.”
Similarly, groups clearly rooted in underground hardcore, such as Converge, Bloodlet and Earth Crisis, adopted death metal’s sheer ferocity as the perfect vehicle for both their personal and political views.
“Our idea was to meld all the different styles of music together that we liked,” says former Earth Crisis vocalist Karl Buchner, whose band militantly professed of vegan and straightedge lifestyles. “Me and Scott [Crouse], who wrote the majority of our guitar work, were into was those bands, like Bolt Thrower and Obituary and Carcass and Napalm Death. We liked how they had those superslow, heavy breakdowns. We loved those bands, and we always wore their shirts an
d we always tried to play with them. But you obviously wouldn’t call what we were playing death metal.”
These developments were all clear to then-Terrorizer editor Nick Terry, who wrote in his editorial accompanying the magazine’s 1996 year-end list, “At the start of the year, nothing seemed so ghastly and tedious to our reviewers as penning a few words on a death metal album. And since every writer who voted this year has been, at one stage or another, a death metal fan, we know what we’re talking about.”
“Definitely in ‘96, there wasn’t much out there,” says Terry now, reflecting on a list that featured no death metal albums in its top 10. “You look at the big death metal record that came out that year, Carcass’ Swansong—it sucked. And what else was there? There wasn’t an Obituary or Deicide or Morbid Angel record that year. Most of the records had come in ‘95, so the problem, in a way, was actually the two-year album cycle. It just happened that there were very few full-stop death metal records that year, and most of the ones that came out were shit. Also, a lot of the death metal bands that had made death metal records had decided to ‘progress out of the genre.’ By the end of the year, there were pretty much examples of almost every type of death metal band having gone in that way, or bands that had previously more of a death metal element having decided to become more gothic, progressive or black metal.”
There were, however, also signs of hope for conventional death metal in the coming year.
“But by the autumn,” continued Terry in his notes, “it was clear that a remarkable turnaround had taken place. Vader and Arch Enemy were the bulldozers that blazed a path back to artistic greatness.”
“Clearly, the Arch Enemy record was great, the sort of mainstream thing that Carcass should have made after Heartwork,” Terry explains now. “It was the Carcass record that Swansong wasn’t.”
“I was enjoying not having anything to do with that kind of music and just playing everything else that I could do after Carcass,” says Arch Enemy founder and former Carnage/Carcass guitarist Michael Amott. “Then, after a year or two, these Carcass-type riffs just started coming to me—I guess that’s a sign that it’s in my blood. I just kept taping them, and I ended up with a hundred riffs. Then I got Arch Enemy together and we recorded the first album, which actually contains a few riffs that were originally intended for Carcass.”
“Then you had Vader at the other, less melodic, more traditional end of the spectrum,” says Terry. “Vader was coming practically on the heels of the news of David Vincent leaving Morbid Angel. It completely filled that hole. You had Cryptopsy, whose None So Vile was something different. It was fresh and new and just more extreme. It was progressive and challenging. It wasn’t one of these typical sludgy Suffocation-type things.”
Expanding on the progressive tendencies of later Death, Holland’s Pestilence and Florida death metal avants Cynic, who released only one album, Focus, in 1993, Cryptopsy added complex twists and turns into their arrangements that would challenge even accomplished jazz musicians.
“The way we started was more along the lines of typical death metal and grindcore,” admits Cyptopsy drummer Flo Mounier. “Then we got to a point where we could tweak it and play around with it, because the musicianship got really serious. I’d say it was towards the end of None So Vile where we really started tweaking things. At that time, I was growing out of just listening to metal altogether and just listening to different types of music, and trying to soak up different ideas so we can bring it back to the band and meld it into Cryptopsy, and it’s just been growing ever since.”
Still, a complete recovery wasn’t fully under way.
“To be honest, the early part of ‘97—just from the release cycle—it was just fallow,” says Terrorizer’s Terry. “But then before long, there was an Obituary record, and Deicide put out a record as well—two of the flagship bands had returned. Then Brutal Truth followed as well. And then I’d definitely say that Vital Remains’ Forever Underground was also a key record in terms of demonstrating that a death metal band that was ultimately second or third division a few years earlier could rise up and make a great record.”
Perhaps even more crucial than death metal’s recovering health was the reality that black metal’s stranglehold on the underground was finally loosening. Experiencing much the same saturation death metal did years before, black metal’s popularity subsidence meant a level playing field where death metal could coexist with other genres of extreme music. Though it wasn’t quite the commercial or artistic force it had been in previous years, by the end of 1997, death metal had visibly regained some credibility on the extreme music landscape.
“Clearly I’d call it a rebirth,” says Relapse Records founder Matt Jacobson. “I could see this, because a lot of things work in cycles, and frankly, a lot of times bands’ best albums are within their first three records, and so by the time they come around to their fifth record, they’re either broken up or they suck. And on top of that, although there’s no way to define them or see them, there are somehow breaks in generations. A death metal band is on the rise and playing shows, and therefore all the kids can totally feel it and are a part of it and are excited about it. But you give it five years down the line and those people are out of it or there are only a few left, and then new kids aren’t into that rehashed old band that sucks. They’re into the next new band that’s the rise, so I think that’s what happened to some degree, because people felt that death metal died.
“You’ll notice that Relapse was basically the only label that continued to release death metal records during that mid-‘90s period,” Jacobson continues. “A lot of the other labels that had been mainstays in the past, whether it was Roadrunner or Nuclear Blast or even Earache, almost all of them moved away from death metal and signed up all of these goth metal bands or power metal bands and black metal bands, but they all kind of abandoned death metal. And then when things started to cycle around again, they were like, ‘Oh, shit, we’d better jump back on board again.’”
To their credit, Relapse unearthed one of the bands that helped bring death metal back from the dead. In 1997, the label signed Nile, a South Carolina-based act founded by guitarist Karl Sanders in 1993. Although Sanders’ formal link with the death metal scene dates back to 1987, when the guitarist briefly resided with Morbid Angel while the group was living in Charlotte, Nile was, in fact, the first brutal death metal band Sanders officially assembled.
“Well, if your connection to death metal is Morbid Angel, that’s pretty untouchable,” Sanders explains. “To me, it’s unthinkable. I’m gonna do this thing and not even be a fucking speck, not even coming close to what I saw these guys do right in front of me. Why would I wanna try to do their gig and do it half-assed? It would just be laughable. How on earth can you touch that early Morbid Angel? You can’t. Even the playing technique was not evolved enough to the point where I could have done anything that I felt was worthy of standing on its own and having respect. I had to be my own guy for a while.
“Death metal had already peaked and had taken a plunge by the time we actually formed Nile,” he continues. “I knew guys back in ‘92 that would take their pay-check every week and buy five or six death metal CDs, but that wasn’t happening anymore. All this stuff was sitting on the shelf, and bands were getting dropped like crazy. So all of a sudden it was really not cool. But we were like, ‘Yeah, but we like it.’”
Following a pair of self-released EPs, the band’s debut LP Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka, released in April of 1998, combined Sanders’ fascination with Egyptian culture and lore with the ferocity of time-honored death metal. And like Morbid Angel a decade prior, Nile’s epic compositions were imbued with a symphonic, neoclassical element that separated them from the streamlined brutality of other bands of the genre.
“Out-weirding Morbid Angel is no easy task,” wrote Terrorizer for the magazine’s year-end issue, in which Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka placed 12th, “but Nile pulled it off with 1998’s best
brutal death metal debut, Ancient Egypt was evoked back from the dead as these Americans went into battle, piling up hands and fans as they went.”
“It’s kinda like a dichotomy,” says Sanders of the band’s Egyptian-tinged death metal ethos. “I think the music stands alone. If you didn’t put any words in it at all, it would still be interesting music. But the words kind of give a point to it—they tell a story. When I was a kid, my dad would have big epic flicks on all the time, like Ben Hur, Sodom and Gomorrah, Land of the Pharaohs, and The Ten Commandments. So I thought it was just this amazing kind of thing, and I always had a personal interest in it. Ancient Egypt seems a lot more fascinating to me than driving down the street in Anytown, USA, where there’s the Fast Fare, there’s the McDonalds, and then there’s the Quickie Mart. Nowadays, you wanna talk about religion in America, you go to a church. We have entirely dull lives and surroundings, and even our beliefs are fucking mundane. So it was just a much more interesting place for my head to be.”
“The Egyptians were a totally pagan culture,” Nile guitarist Dallas-Toller Wade adds succinctly. “It’s perfect death metal material.”
1998 also saw the return of the reconfigured Morbid Angel. With an album’s worth of material already complete, guitarist Trey Azagthoth recruited gravelthroated ex-Ceremony bassist/vocalist Steve Tucker to replace the departed David Vincent.
“It wasn’t easy,” says Tucker, of replacing the very popular Vincent. “Death metal’s a weird genre. The fans, for as brutal and as loyal and as great as they are, at the same time, there’s a lot of them who are very goofy. I think, a lot of times, if it isn’t exactly the way it started out, then people have a problem dealing with it, which is very funny because a band like Morbid Angel is all about nonconformity. The fact of the matter is, David Vincent left. He didn’t believe it anymore. So many people talk about David coming back, and I’ve got no problem with David, but I think these people are fucking ignorant. David is so far from it, it’s unreal. What makes the whole situation so ironic is the fact that these are the same people that are supposedly nonconformist, and they have a complete lack of ability to accept change.
Choosing Death Page 20